Winnipeg Design Festival | PROTO-

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Location

Downtown Winnipeg

Winnipeg, MB

The Winnipeg Design Festival attempts to cultivate and share Winnipeg’s rich community of talented and creative individuals; and the products of their creative processes of design and making. WDF also strives to build and cultivate interdisciplinary relationship and partnerships with industry and like-minded organizations that promote the value of the good design of art, objects, architecture, and the greater built environment.

StorefrontMB is pleased to announce the theme of the 2019 Winnipeg Design Festival (2019 WDF), PROTO-, with Jae-Sung Chon as acting curator. Following the theme, 2019 WDF will focus on encouraging, embracing, celebrating, and respecting the idea of the ‘first-in-time’ or ‘first-of’ within Winnipeg’s dynamic design culture. This year’s festival will be curated and directed by Jae-Sung Chon and his design team STUFF (Studio for Transformative Urban Forms and Fields). Jae-Sung believes that Winnipeg should be a city for prototyping new ideas! “Let’s rebrand Winnipeg as a proto-city: a city where new ideas are encouraged and embraced, as its core urbanism.” He thinks that Winnipeg’s year-round festivals and events are fuelled by the experimental spirits that the city has always embraced. “Winnipeg has always been a place where new ideas and unlikely alliances are forged and accepted, from the time of its settlement (the Forks) through the legacy of its modern architecture (WAG), which continues today (CMHR).” As an educator (a faculty member at the Faculty of Architecture University of Manitoba), Jae-Sung emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture that embraces ‘young-emerging-(proto) ideas’, a critical ingredient for the cultural growth. “Winnipeg can become a city of perpetual festivity, a living laboratory, a campus full of young/fresh ideas, where one learns and grows through living the proto-urban conditions.”